Abstract Guidelines

Abstracts

Advice for Writing an Abstract

An abstract is a concise summary of your completed project that provides a snapshot of it as a whole. The abstract should be written as a single paragraph of 250 words or less (not including title, authors, department) and include the following elements:

1. Motivation/rationale for the project: What did you set out to do and why? Why is it important/significant/interesting? What problem does the work attempt to solve, or what intellectual or theoretical gap does it aim to fill?

2. Methods/procedure/approach: What did you do and how? What is the scope of the project? What models or specific approaches did you use? What sources of evidence did you rely on?

3. Results/conclusions: What did you find/learn/conclude? An abstract of a scientific project may include specific data. Other abstracts may discuss the findings in a more general way.

4. Implications: What does it mean and how does it relate to what else is known? How does this work add to the existing body of knowledge? What are the implications for the problem/issue identified in part 1?